Given the recent dramatic growth in wireless and cellular communications, more and more businesses and other entities are integrating themselves with mobile device technologies. In addition to standard voice features, modern cellular phones and similar devices provide countless other services, such as internet access, email, short messaging service (SMS) texting, digital cameras, multimedia messaging service (MMS), Bluetooth, gaming, various web-based applications and the like. As a result, telecommunication carriers and network operators have been under increased pressure to provide more and more service offerings to their subscribers. Today's network operator wants to attract new and retain customers, develop profitable new business models, improve returns and launch new services as quickly as possible. In addition, the possible competitive pressures from other entities such as internet-based providers have been a growing area of concern in this field.
Faced with these challenges, most operators expect a drastic increase in their portfolio of content and application offerings, from a handful now, to thousands and possibly even millions in the future. While some of these offerings will be developed and deployed in house, the vast majority of these new applications will likely be sourced from partners, Web applications such as social networking sites and third party service providers. These outsourced services will be deployed and executed outside of the carrier's internal network, thereby creating new challenges in security, integration and management of the environment.
To assist with these challenges, new multiprotocol gateways and other software applications have emerged, which are typically deployed by the network operator as part of a service development platform (SDP). These gateways usually provide features for managing the ecosystem between the operator, its internal subscriber network and various third party providers. For example, a communication services gateway may help to secure third party access to the operator's core network, provide service level agreement (SLA) enforcement, as well as perform numerous other functions.
While such gateways have done much to improve the telecommunication service environment, there still exists significant room for advancement in terms of better scalability, responsiveness to ever changing customer demands and the deployment of new services and offerings. As a simple example, the gateway may need to be frequently upgraded with new features and functionality. However, it is generally undesirable to take the gateway offline since it is likely to be processing subscriber communications at all times. As such, it would be desirable to provide a more dynamic upgrade process for various components, while taking into account all of the specific requirements of the telecommunication services environment. Applicants have identified the foregoing as well as other needs that currently exist in the art in coming to conceive the subject matter of the present disclosure.